I've been using PingPlotter for several years, and had the latest version since it came out. Recently, maybe resulting from one or more Windows Updates, I've started seeing a very vexing problem.

Only when PP is loaded, my Windows Shell (Windows XP SP2, fully patched, on a 1.6G P5 with 768M RAM running anywhere from 20% - 40% memory utilisation) will crash. I'll see any of 5 symptoms:
1) With the taskbar stretched 3 rows high, and "Group similar taskbar buttons" enabled (which is absolutely the only way to handle all of the open tasks), when I click on a taskbar button that represents more than one task (maybe multiple instances of the browser), I'd expect for a pop-up menu to appear, listing the multiple instances. No menu appears.
2) Explorer.exe restarts, causing my Quick Launch buttons to rearrange themselves.
3) The pop-up menus in my Start Menu, which would normally open up on mouse-over, don't. I get an error tone on mouse-over.
4) The active task buttons in the taskbar will rearrange themselves.
5) The icons in the notification area will rearrange, and worse yet, some will hide themselves, yet not be unhidable ("Hide inactive icons" is OFF - I hate that hidden icon crap).

Now, I'm fully expecting this problem to involve PP interacting with another program, so I won't blame PP completely for this. BUT, when PP is NOT running (which is seldom, since PP is one of my essential tools which I prefer to run 7 x 24 / 365), this problem DOES NOT happen.

Recently, this has been happening at least once / day, with the only cure being to restart the system. I left PP unstarted the last time I restarted, which was over a day ago, and my shell is still running fine.

I had a brief conversation (text chat) with the Windows Shell team, and one expert said that he will try to reproduce the problem. He also said I should inventory what's running when this happens, and PP happens to be the one thing that is:
1) Always running when this happens;
2) Not running when this does not happen.

Oh yes, the crash does not generate a crash report. Just the above corruptions.

If I disable "Group similar taskbar buttons", I can get to all of my tasks. But they are so small, all I can see are the tiny icons. The only cure is to restart the system.

Comments? <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

I've seen these symptoms before on one of our development machines - although one that doesn't normally run PingPlotter 24X7 (but does stay on for weeks sometimes with PingPlotter running pretty often during then).

We have another machine here, though (running XP SP2), that runs PingPlotter constantly - and has been for years (literally) - with occasionally reboots for patching. There are no similar symptoms there.

An old version of PingPlotter (in the 1.x line) had some problems that sound similar - caused by creating a new thread for each new packet sent out. After running for a few days, Windows would start to have problems. We fixed this in a later release by recycling threads. This same type of thing could possibly be happening with another resource type, though (handle, network socket, other?) - we just need to identify what that resource is, and find out if PingPlotter is doing something that is inciting some odd behavior on that front.

What packet type are you using (ICMP, UDP, TCP?), and what trace interval? Are you using a software firewall (ie: ZoneAlarm), and if so, what version? How many instances of PingPlotter do you normally run?

We're definitely interested in looking in to this problem further.

- Pete